


A Way To Go On

by theLoyalRoyalGuard



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil
Genre: After the barricade, Found Family, Gen, gavroche lives!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 09:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16616231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLoyalRoyalGuard/pseuds/theLoyalRoyalGuard
Summary: After the barricade falls, Javert finds a sole survivor. Little does he know, the troublesome gamin may save his life, too. Inspired by a little musical moment in the 2012 movie. Found family fic.





	A Way To Go On

Evening enfolded the shattered remains of the barricade when Inspector Javert returned. Broken glass crunched under his boots as he picked his way between the bodies of the dead boys. Traitors, all. He recognized a few under the hazy yellow beam of his lamp. Most, he did not. Smoke still floated in the thick, humid air, acrid in the back of his throat. Already, soldiers were moving through the ruin, counting and collecting the dead, searching them for identification to notify families. The ones that had any. He must move quickly if he was to learn anything. 

He searched diligently, methodically, from one huddled mound to the next. Once, he thought he saw grey hair, and lunged forward, lantern outstretched, but it was only ash and a dirty handkerchief with a monogram. Disgusted, he didn't stop to read it. 

He went into the nearest building. The one where he'd been tied up, he realized, when he saw the broken table and the post. He curled his lip and moved on.  
The stairs were positively hazardous. They groaned beneath his feet, and he walked carefully, keeping close to the wall. The smoke was worse above, trapped in the small spaces. Javert covered his mouth with his sleeve and pressed on. 

Here, he recognized only one body. The gilded hair now full of dust, a beacon of tragedy. In death, he looked like a holy icon, his suffering engraved in alabaster and gold. He lay hand in hand with another, gripped so tight even the firing squad couldn't part them. 

But they weren't what Javert was looking for. They weren't... him. 

He had come so close, again, and yet again, Valjean had slipped away from him. The man was a devil. Even while he searched the dead, Javert didn't really believe he would find the old man here. He almost didn't want to. There would be no satisfaction in finding an empty corpse. The thought horrified him. No, Valjean would not die here.  
It was in that morbid horror that Javert was bound to search for him, to search every face and be absolutely certain. 

But in the end, it wasn't Valjean he found. On the other side of the barricade, in the empty no man's land where the honorable dead had already been cleared away, there was only one body left. One small, huddled bundle of rags. Javert approached through the rising fog, shuddering inside his heavy coat. He knew what it was before he touched it, but the same dogged horror that drove him to search for Valjean made him reach out, and roll the bundle over. 

He shone his light onto the face of the child Gavroche, the brazen little creature that had betrayed him to the golden icon, that fallen angel. This was the whispering snake. Clever and sharp the way only street children were. 

The way he has once been. 

With a strange and terrible pang he could not recognize as conscious, he saw himself in the child's face. How young the lean, hungry lines of desperation had appeared. The fury of him, unbridled and undirected. Javert had found purpose, had turned his fury to serve the order and the light against chaos. 

And this child? This child had known only chaos, and it had brought him death. 

He moved to cover the child's face with his ragged little coat, and something warm fluttered against his hand. 

Chaos still breathed. 

~

Carrying the dying child through the gathering fog was absolutely not something Inspector Javert ought to be doing. It went against the grain of his life, everything he had trained himself to believe. There were no second chances in Javert’s life. There were no exceptions and no place for mercy. 

Until he had become the exception, given a second chance, given mercy by one who had every reason under Heaven not to grant it to him. 

He existed now in a nightmare upside-down reality where the very stars he’d clung to exploded around him like cannonfire and broken glass. In this extremity, he found one small purpose and held tight to that instead. Not a star, but a little devil wrapped in a bloody coat.

He embraced chaos and carried him home.

The flat was small and barren, the floorboards scarred rough, the furnishing absolutely minimal. A coat rack, a writing desk and chair, a small hard bed like a monk’s pallet against the wall. Frowning ferociously, Javert crossed the room and laid the boy on his coverlet. Trapped in dreamlike calm, he woke his neighbor and sent him for a surgeon. Knowing the boy wouldn’t last, he cut up an old shirt to clean the wounds and stem the bleeding. 

“What took you so long?” he growled, when the surgeon arrived an hour later.

“It is the middle of the night, monsieur. Have a thought to the hour.”

“Have a thought to your oath,” Javert replied. “The angel of death does not care for your sleep.”

He offered no explanations to the child’s presence or his condition. He could not have explained his actions if he tried, and had no wish to think about them. Already, by necessity, he had weighed them and found himself both wanting and incapable of having done otherwise. “Do what you can for him. I will be back in the morning to pay your fee.”

~

Though it was June, the night was cold and dark. Fog obscured everything. The strips of sky between the roofs above glared like black slitted eyes, judging him. Even the stars had turned their backs. Javert had but one chance at reprieve, one hope for restoring balance to the shattered fulcrum of his life. He had erred, he must make amends.

He must find Valjean.

Tracking the fugitive granted the distraction he required, the purpose he clung to. A hound on the last stretch of the hunt, finally bringing his fox to ground, all else fell away. He was exultant in his ferocity. At long last, this tangled thread in his life could be tied off. He would be free of Valjean, and justice done. 

But finding him offered no peace, no salvation. Once more, he found mercy where none should exist. He found righteousness where darkness should have reigned. He found a man who mocked the laws of the world, who turned the clear boundaries of good and evil upside down. 

And Javert let him go. He betrayed himself a second time, and, unable to fathom what either of them had done, he fled. Stumbling over the uneven cobbles of the Paris streets, he faced the shattered remains, not of idealistic boys, but of his own ideals. His own beliefs lay ruined around him, as utterly destroyed by Valjean as that barricade had been by the cannons.

The law might be as unyielding as stone, as implacable as god’s will, but Javert was as weak as glass and old wood. When struck, he had broken.

There was nothing left.

No way, in his abject failure, to go on.

The fog rose off the Seine, coiled up the pillars and struts of the bridge, muffled every sound. Even the hammer of his own heart had gone still. He faced the ghosts of himself in the silent anguish of the night. The lost, angry boy who had been resurrected from the prison where he’d been born. A boy so full of hate he was damned from birth. The young man with his new laws and his new uniform, so certain of the right way of the world, so proud to uphold the rule of law. Clinging to it, he saw now, not only because he believed in it, but like a lifeline to a drowning swimmer. He’d embraced the law because he believed it would save him from vice, from the base blackness of sin from which he had arisen. 

Dizzy, he turned on the spot, one hand on the rail of the bridge. He faced himself, the aging bulldog, the law embodied. When he opened his lips to speak, the fog choked him. He had no defense from the eyes of the law. 

The lifeline had broken.

He was already drowned.

The river waited below, seething, offering the final embrace of the abyss. The horror that had trailed him on the barricade close its jaws on his throat and he leaned out into the void, his face turned up to heavens that did not look back.

In his life, there was only chaos. 

Chaos in the body of a dying boy. He had forgotten the boy. He had forgotten that he had to pay the surgeon. Would he leave with a debt? Could leave the child to die alone in his bed?

His white-knuckled grip on the rail loosened, sliding towards nothing… 

With a great cry of frustrated despair, Javert reeled backwards from the brink. He staggered, nearly falling. East over the city, the first flush of dawn lit the soft edges of the fog.

~

Chaos had all the gratitude of a feral kitten. 

Gavroche had a tendency towards snide remarks and spat curses, which Javert found extremely bold coming from an invalid confined to his host’s bed. Javert slept in the room’s only armchair, when he slept at all. Fitfully and plagued by nightmares. 

He supposed, given the nature of the creature in his house, he ought to be glad he hadn’t been bitten when he changed the dressing on the child’s wounds. There was, miraculously, no infection. Grace had saved them both, though Javert regretted it every day. 

On the fifth day, he held out the bowl of broth he had intended to give the boy, just out of his reach. Gavroche glared at him.

“You will thank me when I bring you supper,” he said coldly. “And if one more foul word passes your lips, I shall turn you out into the street where you belong. You may see what good your curses do you there.”

Gavroche, still dangerously colorless, went papery pale. There was less satisfaction in frightening him than Javert might have hoped for. 

“Nah, you won’t,” the boy said, rolling his eyes. “C’mon, I may be little, but I’m nobody’s fool.”

“You are certainly acting the fool at the moment,” Javert said dryly. “What makes you so certain I won’t abide by my word?”

“You want me for somethin’. You think I’m gonna squeal on my friends.” He folded his arms across his chest.

“Ah, and you intend to keep sleeping in my bed and eating my food while you allow me to believe you might, as you say, squeal on your friends? Only to disappoint me, in the end, voila, by resisting all my best methods of interrogation. Do I have it right?” 

The thin little shoulders shrugged under the wool blanket that was all that covered Javert’s bed. He’d never paid any mind to the fact that it scratched. After all, he spent so little time there, it scarcely mattered enough for him to do anything about it. 

“I see,” he went on. “Well, know this. There is no one left for you to squeal on, monsieur Gavroche, no one at all. Your friends are dead. And if you wish not to join them, you shall learn manners. Am I quite clear?”

The child stared sullenly down at his hands.

“You will answer me when I address you.”

The child glared down at his hands.

Javert turned to walk away, taking the bowl with him. There was a single beat of stubborn silence, and then Gavroche said, “May I have my supper, please? Sir.”

Javert chose to ignore the mockery in the final word this time, and brought him his supper.

~

When he began to find things have moved in his flat, it became clear to Javert that Gavroche was on his feet again. Smooth patches in the dust on the windowsill were evidence of his coming and going during the day. Curiously, he was always in bed when Javert returned, always maintaining weakness even when his wounds were quite clearly healed. He feigned feeling ill and dizzy when asked. The summer days were hot inside, he said. When asked about the dust, he protested that he’d only opened the window to get a little air.

“Ah,” said Javert, “so you are strong enough to walk.”

Which meant it was time for the boy to go. Javert could hardly afford, nor did he desire, to keep chaos in his life any longer than mercy had strictly required. He already had to lock up his things in his writing desk and hope the boy didn’t find a way to pick the small lock. What little money he kept, he now took with him on his person. He was quite ready for the disruptions of his orderly life to cease.

But when it came to actually evicting Gavroche, he hesitated. One day, two, and then three. By the third day, he was left with no choice but to examine his hesitation. 

First, the boy cried in his sleep. This should not matter. Javert’s heart of stone had never been softened by tears in his life, and it wasn’t going to start now. 

Second, Jean Valjean had forced upon him the idea that men could change. That one act of wrong did not dictate thereafter a life of evil.

Third, if Gavroche were removed from his life, he would be left to face his failures with the full brutality of absolute solitude. He would have nothing at all to show for what had occurred within him, but neither could he pretend it had not happened.

Therefore, perhaps the boy could change. Could chaos be taught to respect the law? Well, had he not himself once been an angry child who cried in the dark? Perhaps the attempt, the experiment, to reform him fell on Javert as a kind of justice for his own faults.

So he gave him, at last, an ultimatum. It was the end of July, nearly two months and already the barricade and its youthful dead nearly forgotten. “Well, monsieur Gavroche, here we are at an end. You cannot pretend any longer to be unwell.”

Indeed, if anything, he had grown stronger here, with daily meals and plenty of rest. His wrists now showed an extra inch out of the sleeves of his patched coat, and his ankles were dirty and white and stuck out even more.

“You’re turning me out, then?” His dark eyes glittered. He did not look at all afraid, but neither did he make to leave.

“Naturally. I have no doubt you’ll end up in a chain gang in five years, but that’s no business of mine.” The boy stiffened, his hands twisted around each other. Apparently, that idea had some effect on him.

“I shall not!”

“No? It’s true, there is another option. You may stay here. But,” he held up a warning hand, “there will be rules. They are imperative, they are not to be broken, no missteps, no mistakes, no accidents will be tolerated. Do you understand? You may choose.”

“Here?” Gavroche’s jaw dropped open. “Here? With you?”

“Indeed, such a distasteful thought for us both, I don’t blame you for refusing.” Javert began to turn away, moving to unlock his writing desk. He had work to do.

The boy turned bright red. “I-- I have not refused.”

“No?” Javert calmly removed his key, fit it into the lock. His hand was steady. Having made up his mind, he did not question the decision. It was too late for that, anyway.

“No.” There was a very long silence. So long, Javert had time to take out his paperwork, open his inkpot, and begin to mix the ink inside. So long, he began to wonder if Gavroche would continue at all.

And then, chaos said softly, “I should like to learn to read, please. Sir.”

Javert tucked his chin down into his high collar to hide his smile. There was a way to go on, after all.

~

On warm summer evenings, just about sunset, when the fog just begins to coil off the river, one might see Inspector Javert walking in the park. At his side is a gangly youth, no longer a boy but not quite yet a man. They dress in sober jackets and speak quietly, but they are a fearsome looking pair. The Inspector like an old guard dog, rigid in his control, and the youth with the confident swagger of a tomcat that wins all its fights. They look nothing at all alike, but they walk in step as if they have been doing it for a long time.

And those who know the Inspector might comment, though not where he can hear, that the youth is like the son he might have had, if god had granted him a son.

They don’t know, that’s exactly what the Inspector believes.


End file.
